ABSTRACT
The Boston Globe reported that although promises of American Federation of Labor strike fund assistance were encouraging, “it was a gloomy Thanksgiving at best.” The recently-created coalition of trade union leaders and social reformers known as the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) joined in this struggle. The WTUL would come face to face with the limitations of its own organization as it attempted to put into practice its goals for wage-earning women. The Bureau’s investigation found that only in Fall River and nearby New Bedford did the number of married women exceed 20 percent of the total female workforce of each city. In 1900 “Fall River had a higher percentage of foreign-born inhabitants than any other city in the United States.” Ethnic divisions were certainly a major factor in the apparent triumph of craft over industrial unionism, at least among the Fall River textile workers.
